What Cromulent Means, and the Simpsons Episode It's From
2 min read
Cromulent means acceptable, or fine. It was invented for a single line of The Simpsons, spoken by a teacher defending another word the show had just made up.
The short version
Cromulent is an adjective meaning acceptable or satisfactory. It comes from The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Iconoclast" (Season 7, Episode 16, 1996), where Miss Hoover says "embiggens" is "a perfectly cromulent word." Merriam-Webster added it in September 2023, labelled informal and humorous.
Wear it
The scene that launched a thousand dictionary entries
"Lisa the Iconoclast" aired on February 18, 1996. It opens on an old documentary about Jebediah Springfield, the town's founder, playing to a room of Springfield Elementary kids and teachers.
In the film, a settler asks Jebediah how he can hope to achieve such greatness. Jebediah: "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."
The room cheers. Mrs. Krabappel, to Miss Hoover: "Embiggens? Hm, I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield."
Miss Hoover: "I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."
Then the scene moves on to the town's bicentennial. Nobody questions either word. The rest of the episode is Lisa finding out that Jebediah was really Hans Sprungfeld, a pirate who once tried to kill George Washington.
Jonathan Collier wrote the episode. According to Bill Oakley's DVD commentary, David X. Cohen came up with "cromulent" and Dan Greaney came up with "embiggen."
What "cromulent" actually means
The show never defines it. You get the meaning from how it's used: Miss Hoover is vouching for "embiggens," so cromulent has to mean something like legitimate, valid, fine. A made-up word certifies another made-up word, and it sounds right because of the ending. Fraudulent, corpulent, succulent: "-ulent" words sound like they've been in the dictionary for centuries.
Merriam-Webster's entry now reads "informal + humorous: acceptable, satisfactory." The usual phrase is still "perfectly cromulent," and it usually means fine, with a raised eyebrow.
From Springfield to Oxford
The Oxford English Dictionary got there first. "Doh" went into the OED in June 2001. The dictionary dropped the apostrophe and noted the exclamation was in print back in the 1950s, so Homer popularised it rather than inventing it.
Cromulent has no earlier life. The OED added it alongside "embiggen" in 2018. Merriam-Webster took embiggen in March 2018 and held off on cromulent until its September 2023 update, 27 years after the episode aired.
The embiggens connection
Embiggen is the other half of the joke, and its dictionary history is stranger. It had turned up once before the show: C. A. Ward used it in an 1884 issue of the journal Notes and Queries.
After 1996 it got a second life. A 2007 string theory paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics used it, and Nature ran a short item explaining it the same year. Merriam-Webster added it in March 2018, five years before cromulent.
Both words come from the same 15 seconds of a school documentary.
The Cromulent tee is, by the dictionary's own definition, satisfactory.
More Springfield deep cuts: Dignity | Milpool | Steamed hams
